An interesting post on how different IM providers are embracing open standards:

Consider that everyone IMs. Websites come and go - but IM remains. What’s important about that is that your social network persists over many, many years. My friendster buddy list is essentially useless - since I no longer use that site. But my AIM buddy list, which I still use, has been around for over 10 years. And with XMPP, it’s now reusable. It could become the standard machine-readable way to represent a social network.

IM 2.0